A side-effect of the Bank of England's monetary policies over the last four years has been to protect property values. Some of that can be seen in figures from the estate agents Savills, which says the value of rented homes in Britain has soared by 42% to £840bn.

Everyone wants to rent properties for a living. It's easier than working and seems to bring in a guaranteed income.

The mania for buying and selling homes for magical profits was supposed to be a thing of the past. If the crash taught us anything, it was that flippin' flats after a quick makeover for big bucks was the nation's downfall. But here we are, supping from the property gravy train again.

Savills reckons 4.8m rented homes generated a total income last year of £48bn. By 2016, such is the dearth of house and flat building, the rent extracted by landlords will have soared to £70bn.

With housebuilding at its lowest since the 1920s, the number of homes coming on the market cannot keep up with a growing population, a mini-baby boom, the changing needs of an ageing population and the ongoing complications of family break-ups.

Everyone seems to want to reinvent the recent past and a spiv culture that meant there was a killing to be made buying and selling ordinary homes. What we need is more executive homes in tidy little cul-de-sacs that look like Brookside Close houses with the addition of a garage or two. These can be tacked on the sides of existing towns, preferably in the home counties, within shouting distance of London, where people need to work but cannot afford to live.

The same scenario can be found dominating the thinking of property firms around cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle, where there is pressure to relax rules on greenfield building to satisfy demand.

The government's NewBuy scheme, which subsidises the mortgages on new homes, coupled with a relaxation of planning laws, is supposed to hurry along these developments. However, NewBuy only encourages hard-pressed families to bid up the cost of the few newly built homes already on the market, to the benefit of housebuilders (which contribute millions to Tory party coffers).

Local councils are in effect out of the housebuilding equation, while social landlords are seeing their budgets cut. With the public and semi-public sectors shackled, the private lobby calls the shots. This leaves the government with two problems: how to get the money to build and renovate more homes, and where to build new homes.

Money could come from private sources such as pension funds. My problem with the private sector, pension funds included, is that it just wants to join the game of driving prices and rents higher. The new homes that developers have in mind are only in "safe" areas that will command extraordinarily high rents to compensate for paying the huge purchase cost of land with planning permission and the extortionate sums demanded by investors.

Surely there is a case for resisting the temptation to simply kickstart the same old property game? The government needs to examine ditching property transaction taxes altogether in favour of taxing land on an annual basis. A land tax is the only way to bring the industry to heel and end the spiv culture that brings a boom and bust every generation. It is much the same solution for banks. They need to be made boring and people-friendly. At the moment, the only winners are landowners and landlords.